Stutter

This week at Columbia: a bacterium with a virus at the door reads a short stretch of its own RNA and writes it into DNA, again, again, the same few letters, a long string of one word. The write-up I read doesn't say how that turns the virus.

The family tree, if it's right, puts our telomerase on that branch. At the ends of my chromosomes, TTAGGG, a thousand times or more, nothing a cell reads for sense, there to be spent. Each copying wears some off and the genes behind it keep.

So the hem may have been an answer first, said to a stranger so often it stopped answering and became where I end.